Microsoft sez: Move over, Google Earth

I was perusing /. this morning and came across this:

“Today as we were biking around our neighborhood in a small city we saw a strange vehicle slowly driving around. It appeared to be an SUV, bristling with cameras mounted on the roof, and pointing just about every possible direction…  I asked him if this was Microsoft’s answer to Google Earth, and he indicated that it was…  The Windows site appears to be http://preview.local.live.com/…”

This looks kind of cool.  It’s similar to what I envisioned back in the 90’s when I found out about VRML. 

Now, imagine if Microsoft made structures in the heads-up display clickable.  This could be a new way to go about online shopping.  If you knew of a shop’s location but can’t remember how to spell its name or what their web address is, you could navigate to them on the site and click their storefront.  Chains could link to customized pages based on which store you clicked on.  If you’re trying to sell your house, you could have it linked to your listing.  There are lots of possibilities here.

Required gear for urban warfare: Silly String

Time Magazine is reporting on an unusual use for Silly String:

Stratford, N.J., mom Marcelle Shriver recently got a call from her son Todd requesting … Silly String. Marines working with his unit in Iraq had shown the Army combat engineer how it can be used to detect trip wires.

Link

I also found another report of this use of Silly String from a year ago.

This is great.  I can totally see this being true.

Do you have the smell of burning flesh?

The latest issue of Wired has an interesting article called “The War on Terror.”  It’s about using virtual reality to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans, or Shell-Shock.  Many veterans of war come home with issues.  The problem frequently manifests itself in nightmares and flashbacks.   Also common are depression, anger, and general jumpiness. 

Psychologists are using virtual reality to help soldiers readjust to civilian life and put the ugliness of war behind them.  Technology has advanced to the point where very realistic environments can be created.  Not only with images but sounds and smells as well (hence the title of my post, which is a quote from the article).  Give it a read.

More car theft shenanigans

Back in May, I posted about some of the most expensive cars being the easiest to steal.  I was reading BoingBoing today and came across a related story.  It seems if you have one of these expensive car security systems, insurers consider your car unstealable — if it’s reported stolen, you must be involved.  This is a highly ignorant stance as there is no such thing as “absolutely secure.”  The best part of the story is the revelation that many of these systems have an override.  In the case of the story’s writer, his Civic’s startup security can be bypassed with a series of pulls on the emergency break.

Overrides render a security system absolutely useless against a professional thief.  The same can be said in the computer world — any system with a backdoor is of no use against an experienced cracker.

The RIAA is No Fun

 I was visiting the Sunblet Blog and came across a link to this:

The RIAA is apparently sending out cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users who dare to put up videos of things such as themselves dancing to music they haven’t licensed.

If this is true, then wow, RIAA:  way to be a wet blanket.  YouTube users aren’t making money off of their posts.  The sound quality of a lot of them are fairly poor.

In fairness, I clicked through the various links that led back to the original story.  It doesn’t provide any hard proof this is going on.  There’s no scanned image of a cease-and-desist and no link to a story at a major news outlet.  However, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the (vile) RIAA were doing this.

Sidekick Shenanigans

Stolen from…  everywhere:  How NOT to steal a SideKick.  The synopsys…

Some woman leaves her SideKick2 in a cab in NY.  What happens next is a little fuzzy.  It looks like the cabbie sold the device to some guy who gives it to her 16 year old sister… or the sister buys it form the cabbie… or something.  Anyway, the 16 year old girl ends up with it. 

Meanwhile, the original owner of the SideKick gets her friend involved.  They send text messages to the SideKick saying they would provide a reward for its return.  The girl ignores it and takes pictures of herself and family/friends and signs into AOL with it.  The original owner has access to this information still so her friend posts the pictures and additional info he and others have been able to dig up.  Hilarity ensues.  Check out the above link.

 So… this has inspired me to write about my run-in with some low-life criminals last year.  Before I get into it, I'll spare you the tedium and get right to two of the main things I learned from the experience.

1. Ohio laws concerning pawn shop liability are insane.  If some scumbag absconds with your goods and pawns them, you not only have to pay the pawn shop what they paid the scumbag, but you also have to pay the additional fee they charge to get the goods out of hock.  The idea is since they fill out all kinds of paperwork about the items they take in and provide them to the police, they shouldn't have to be out should they take in stolen goods.  Doesn't make sense to me but that's the way it is
2. Even in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, always plead not-guilty at arraignment.  Never plead guilty.  Taking a case to trial costs time and money — two limited resources in the American justice system.  Prosecutors will plea bargain with you to keep form going to trial.  If you plead guilty right off, you have nothing to bargain with when it comes to sentencing.

On to my story.  I came home from work one day in late July, 2005 to find my house had been burgled.  As I pulled up, I noticed my back gate was open.  This is almost always closed but I let it pass.  However, as soon as I walked into my house from the garage, I knew something was off.  I'had lived in the house for just over 6 years at that point and knew how it "felt."  I notice the change in pressurization when the windows are open and that's the way it felt.  Also, the stairwell was much brighter than usual.  When I got up the stairs I could see the backdoor was open and it began to dawn on my my house had been broken into.  They busted the window out of the back door and unlocked the deadbolt (I now have a double-keyed lock).  They then kicked the door at least twice to get it to open (footprints on the door).  You could tell they originally tried one of the windows in the basement because one of the screen windows was ripped out and there was a big handprint on the glass window — brilliant, huh?  After I checked the house to see if anyone was still inside I looked up the number to the police and started taking inventory of what was missing (I didn't call 911 because it wasn't an emergency at that point).

That night was rather rough.  I couldn't sleep in my bed for fear of disturbing evidence — a detective wasn't going to be able to make it over until the morning.  They had lifted my mattress to see if I hid anything under it and dumped some dresser drawers.  It was tough to actually fall asleep because of feelings of insecurity.  It's rather disconcerting to have a gaping hole in your house that anyone can enter through.

So, anyway.  They caught the ass-hats breaking into another house a few days later.  They decided to break form and broke into this house around 7 PM.  They got mine somewhere between when I left for work in the morning and 1:30 — the time on the receipt at the pawn shop for the computer they took from me.  The owners came home while they were there.  They ran out the back and left their car parked in the driveway.  The ringleader — we'll call him guy1 (21 years old)– decided to hang around the vicinity for some reason and got pinched. 

The car belonged to the girl — girl1 (19 years old).  She went to a police station in another jurisdiction and claimed she'd been car-jacked.  The officers there weren't believing her story and called bullshit.  She fessed up to how she lost her car.  Between her and guy1, they gave up guy2 (18 years old).  The detective investigating that burglary noticed the PDA and digital camera found in girl1's car sounded familiar.  He checked the recent bulletins and found they matched the description from my police report.  They ended up finding evidence of five burglaries which the ne're-do-wells confessed to.  The police think they were involved in more burglaries but could only come up with evidence for the five.

I got the PDA and camera back.  The station I picked them up from didn't have any memory card readers so I had to e-mail them the pictures on the camera.  The took a few pictures where you really couldn't make out anything.  One picture was apparently of an employee at a pawn shop.  I think one of the guys might have had the hots for her as they snapped a picture of her rather ample back side.  The last picture was of the inside of girl1's car.  Freaking Rhodes Scholars here.  I was later able my computer from the pawn shop and that's when I learned of Ohio's insane laws covering stolen property accepted by pawn shops.  All the pawn shop required was that they turn the computer on to prove it works.  If they'd taken it one step further and asked them to log on it would be obvious the computer didn't belong to them (I require a password for all of my computers).  The rest of my shtuff was never recovered.

Despite the fact they all confessed, they all pled not-guilty.  They weren't all charged with all 5 counts but each count was good for 2-8 years and something like a $10,000 fine.  What the prosecution offered was 2 years for girl1 and guy2.  They offered guy1 5 years.  Girl2 did not really have an adult record prior to this.  Guy2 had a pretty minor adult record.  Guy1 had a rather extensive juvenile and adult record.

Guy2 accepted his plea deal.  Guy1 and girl1 both requested a pre-sentencing investigation in which the judge could sentence them to what he felt the investigation showed they should get.  Girl1 was trying for probabtion and guy1 wanted the same 2-year deal as the others.  Girl1 ended up getting the two years and guy1 got 6 years — the judge doesn't like it when you waste the court's time.   Guy1 is currently appealing his sentence.

The thing that bothers me most about the whole thing is they stole firearms from at least one of the houses they broke into and those were never recovered.  Those firearms are most likely going to be used to bring pain and suffering to others.

Anyway… that's my story.  Congratulations if you made it through the whole thing.

3D Monitors: Sign me up

News.com is reporting on 3D monitors that don't need glasses for the effect.  Sanyo has even come up with a monitor that can display two different programs, depending on your physical location in relation to the monitor.  Apparently, this is all possible because of the high number of pixels in HD displays.

This looks pretty cool.  I see the earliest to take advantage of this being game developers…  and porn.  Actually, the article mentions one company getting "feelers" from the porn industry.  3D boobies sound nice, but I'm not sure I want to see a 3D "money-shot." 

iPods More “In” Than Beer on College Campuses

Cnn is reporting on a survey done by the Student Monitor.  The survey gave students a list of activities and asked whether they were "in."  73% of the respondents rated the iPod as "in" — beating beer and facebook.com at 71%.

I guess I'm not really surprised.  When I was in college (the mid 90's), it didn't really seem like getting drunk was really that high of a priority.  It certainly wasn't a huge priority for me.  I was definitely more into my CD's.  It's the time I was discovering bands like Pennywise, NOFX, the Vandals, Voodoo Glow Skulls, etc.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's weird to use the term "in" with beer?

$60 Enterprise Router

While scanning BoingBoing last night I found this:

Of all the great DIY projects at this year’s Maker Faire, the one project that really caught my eye involved converting a regular old $60 router into a powerful, highly configurable $600 router.

Why is this possible?  Because:

In June 2003 some folks on the Linux Kernel Mailing List sniffed around the WRT54G and found that its firmware was based on Linux components. Because Linux is released under the GNU General Public License, or GPL, the terms of the license obliged Linksys to make available the source code to the WRT54G firmware.

Golden.

MLB doesn’t like Sling

Found this at C|Net:

At the heart of the issue is that Sling Media, Orb Networks and similar companies cut out cable and satellite operators who pay great sums for transmission rights in their areas, according to Kliavkoff. Baseball sells transmission rights to specific geographical locations. So, a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.

Oh, come on!  Do advertisers really get anything out of the deal if you're only visiting their locale?  The advertisers in your home city get much more out of advertising to you.

This is another example of content owners trying to control how you consume their content.  The more and more they try to control us, the less and less we become interested in consuming.  This is one of the reasons I've never purchased anything off of iTunes:  I don't want my listening controlled.  I want to be able to listen to my music from any of my computers or any other device I have.  MLB, RIAA, MPAA et al: get with the times or go away.